The year began with a streak of brightness across a bleak literary sky. Ted Nield's Incoming! Or Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Meteorite (Granta, £20) is a fireball of a book that delivers drollery, illumination and serious instruction in the traffic of the solar system. Meteors are shooting stars: they gain the suffix when they survive as mineral testimony to the congealed stardust from which moons, planets and people are confected. They arrive each year in their tens of thousands, mostly burning up in the atmosphere. These heavenly messengers have worked their way into myth, magic and science, thumping the ground and occasionally a car or a dog, without ever hurting a single human being – so far. The dinosaurs, around when something 10 kilometres in diameter gouged an enormous crater under what is now Mexico, might not have been so lucky.

The horseshoe crabs of Delaware Bay – not really crabs, but let's not get fussy – really were lucky: they have survived whatever nature has thrown at them over the past 260 million years. They were there before the dinosaurs, and they are still here. So is the velvet worm Peripatus of New Zealand and so are the stromatolites of Shark Bay, Australia. Unlike the trilobites, ammonites and plesiosaurs of yesteryear, all washed away by time, leaving only ghostly prints in the sediments, these self-effacing creatures have staying power. Richard Fortey is one of the pillars of modern palaeontology: he also writes like a dream and he had, it turned out, always dreamed of a pilgrimage to observe at first hand those demure fossil contemporaries that refused to turn only to stone. I admit to a bias toward earth sciences, and Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind (Harper Press, £25) is unequivocally my book of the year, a happy mix of global travel, high art and very low life.

Life, according to Tim Flannery, is a performance: we are all "self-choreographed extravaganzas of electrochemical reaction" and the name of the show is Gaia. In Here on Earth: A New Beginning (Allen Lane, £14.99) he takes yet another look at evolutionary and human history, extinction, climate change and the role of civilisations as superorganisms: like certain ant colonies, we survive because we co-operate with other biological entities. We also extinguish them, deliberately and unthinkingly, which is why we need a new beginning in which we respect the biosphere in the persona of Gaia, or Mother Earth. That way we could feed and house 9 billion of us and save the other species too. Seemingly against the evidence that he marshals with poignant efficiency, this distinguished Australian biologist and climate scientist ends on a note of optimism.

Optimism of an almost luminous variety comes from David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Allen Lane, £25). Like Flannery, he also conducts conversations with Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin and Jared Diamond, and like Flannery he memorably defines life ("I am an emergent, quasi-autonomous flow of information in the multiverse") but there the similarity ends. Deutsch thinks on the biggest of scales: 12 years ago, in The Fabric of Reality, he pursued the logic of quantum mechanics (his special field) and identified himself – and us – as simultaneous inhabitants of a preposterously large number of co-existing universes. He pursues the logic of scientific explanation and the sometimes unthinking power that goes with it: a power that extends biological adaptation, perhaps without limit. Once again, he has written a dazzling book full of huge ideas, presented with matchless clarity; he argues that explanatory power has changed, can change and will continue to change our world. The cosmic ideas are fine, and cosmically entertaining. "Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows," he says, as he describes the challenges of identifying distant galaxies on a photographic plate. It's only when he gets down to worldly problems such as climate change, or the population explosion, that one begins to wonder whether explanatory power will be enough.

And finally, late breaking news: freshly in, and still under perusal is what looks like a corker for anyone with an enthusiasm for the underside of history. The World in the Balance, by Robert P Crease (Norton, £18.99) is a discursive history of the systems of weights and measures in China, West Africa, medieval Europe and revolutionary America that merged in the SI units of the metric system. Talleyrand pops up in this story, as do Thomas Jefferson, the artist Marcel Duchamp and Gradgrind of Dickens's Hard Times. And Crease meets Rita Mazella, now aged 70. She is herself a standard measure. Lingerie companies use her breasts – size 34C – to construct new brassiere lines, then scale the size up or down. That is because the simple numbers for band length and cup size, says Crease, "are woefully inadequate to define a complex and mobile shape".